I have a little while to wait here in the airport in Delhi* (flight is in about three and a half hours, but the fun should start when the cricket match begins in an hour and a half), so this seems like an excellent time for another installment of the Chronicles...
*I believe I mentioned this in the previous post, but Terminal 3 at Indira Gandhi International Airport is quite possibly the pinnacle of airport design, and not just because I didn't have to wait in line at immigration when I landed on Thursday. I'm sitting in the pre-security portion waiting for check-in to begin; this part is one gigantic hall, with three walls made entirely out of windows and skylights in the roof. The only support beams are unobtrusively positioned right next to the check-in desks, meaning that they come off more as divisions between the banks of desks than as huge slabs of stone. The exterior is all curves and diagonals, but perfectly calibrated so as not to seem off-puttingly futuristic. With working Wi-Fi and a few more food outlets (sorry, guys, but I really don't need five different kinds of juice stands - a little more actual food would be a lot more useful), it would be absolutely perfect.
First of all, the Taj Mahal is one of the few places I've ever seen that manages to live up to the enormous hype it receives. It is truly a stunning architectural achievement, a spectacular fusion of (at least) three distinct architectural traditions--Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim--set in a beautiful garden and executed to perfection.** Everything in the building is exquisite, from the inlaid stones on the upper facade that sparkle in the sunlight to the marble latticework on the interior to the minarets. The minarets are worth special mention, not because they are particularly intricate (they're actually quite plain), but because they are intentionally angled nine degrees off of the vertical, tilting slightly, but perceptibly, away from the main building of the Taj. The reason? In case of an earthquake, the minarets will fall outwards, crashing to the ground but sparing the main building. It's all perfectly thought out and brilliantly executed.
**Well, three sides of the building are a beautiful garden, anyway. The fourth side is the Jamuna River, which is one of the foulest rivers I've seen in a long time, in addition to only filling about half of its channel at the moment.
The Taj Mahal was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Unfortunately, on the train ride back from Agra to Delhi, I got to see some of the ugliest things I've ever seen. The train passed by some of the most disgusting slums I've ever seen, particularly on what I believe was the outskirts of Faridabad (although I could be wrong - stops are only announced on the most expensive tier of Indian trains. If you're riding the trains that normal Indians ride, as I was, you're on your own). These slums may well never be fully clean ever again, and maybe never have been fully clean. It's the tail end of the dry season, as evidenced by the state of the Jamuna River in Agra, and yet the dirt tracks in these slums were lakes of water from the drizzles of the previous night; if the drainage is that bad now, what happens in the monsoon season? Trash was piled in expansive heaps, at which surprisingly well-fed cows picked half-heartedly. Next to the trash heaps were the circular cow patties that residents use for fuel, which they had laid out to bake in the sun or piled in conical towers. Men lounged or urinated on walls (although the latter is a common practice here, even on the sides of major roads in Delhi); children in filthy, tattered clothes played cricket with filthy, tattered cricket balls. Not that this scene was unique to the outskirts of Faridabad. This morning, at the main train station in Agra--one of the country's largest tourist hubs and home to at least five 5-star hotels--I walked down the platform too close to the tracks and was physically repulsed by the stench of animal waste (I'd guess a mixture of human and bovine, but I didn't exactly investigate. The platforms in Agra were covered in trash and spilled food, and a shockingly large number of people were sleeping on the ground between the benches even at 7:00 this morning (somehow remaining asleep despite the cacaphonous noise of passengers, PA announcements, and train horns).
Obviously India should work on cleaning up the slums, stations, and other loci of poverty and misery, but, to paraphrase Jay-Z, the country has 99 problems and poverty is just one (albeit a big one). There's also no "white man's burden" here; this is India's problem, not mine, and it's not the job of the West to clean up India's cesspools.*** The extent of the slums and the depth of the poverty therein mean that the problem is neither going to go away nor be solved overnight. For the foreseeable future, anyway, this is part of what India is. I'm just not sure how it affects my opinion of the place yet.
***Although the amount of littering by Westerners here is kind of appalling. Just because it's already a mess, guys, doesn't mean that we can make it worse by tossing stuff out of taxi windows. Seriously.
UPDATE FROM BEHIND SECURITY
First of all, the Indians are incompetent at this whole checking-in thing. Air India "opened" about seven check-in counters at one time, all for flights departing between 4:30 and 5:00. Problem is, they only put someone at two of them initially, and didn't bother to tell anyone that the other counters weren't going to be staffed for a while. Eventually they deigned to tell us this, meaning that the few open counters suddenly had huge lines. Then people slowly started to staff the closed counters sporadically. Except that they all were having IT problems. After about 30 minutes, despite initially being the first person in line at my counter, I finally got through.
Now I'm sitting at, I kid you not, the "Cricket Fan Park" in the domestic departures area. There is a gigantic big-screen TV here broadcasting the India-England cricket match, which is about to start. Unfortunately there seems to be no sound, because, you know, they make flight announcements and stuff. But EVERYONE here is watching the TV, except for the (other) foreigners. Security guards. Airport staff. Cleaning people. Just about every Indian here. Everyone is watching.
It's pretty incredible.
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